The Lovely Eggs – I Shouldn’t Have Said That

Fans of the English music underground will know Holly Ross and David Blackwell as The Lovely Eggs. As The Lovely Eggs these DIY-lo-fi lovelies are responsible for some of the shoutiest, sweetest, most disarmingly nuanced music you’ll have heard in a long time. The band that we last heard from on their 2015 album, This Is Our Nowhere, have returned with a couple of tunes, and a shiny great video, “I Shouldn’t Have Said That”, which you can now watch with friends, or alone.

The Lovely Eggs have a reputation for being honest-to-goodness upholders of an ethic that stretches back to punk, but they’re no ‘punk’-Punk, and nor are they meandering through the genre as some kind of chronic devotees to a genre they can’t let go. They’re witty, they’re smart and sensitive – but they’re also dark and wonderful – exploring depths and subtleties that one-dimensional ‘punk’ does not. The Lovely Eggs don’t just dismantle, they create and rebuild… and they continue doing their thing. Thank fuck.

Lyrically, this is a band that explores a range of domestic but also universal questions that make you suspect that they spend a lot of time sheltering in the library, waiting for the northern rain to pass. (Side note: The Lovely Eggs do strike the listener as a duo that would never be late to return a library book.) When Ross sings a line like “I Shouldn’t Have Said That” you know that she knows that there are other words, more complicated phrases, and a string of constructs to excuse her behavior. However, like everything The Lovely Eggs do, she just gets to the point instead. She keeps it simple, keeps it real, and Blackwell rocks the fuck out.

The video is stunning. There are glittery-strand curtains. There’s the spirit of BOB. It’s psychedelic, self-referential, and with odd hints of chaos magick, pyramids, and all-seeing eyes… all good there, then. It’s reminiscent of the types of video you’d see projected against the walls of provincial nightclubs in England during the ‘90’s, where kids knew getting the train to the ‘London cool’ mainstream gigs was beyond their pocket, but getting off their nuts and playing loud music was within reach.

If you have friends who want an easy access to this stuff you should send them to a track like “Fuck It”, an existential delivery of questions and half-answers served on a swelling punk-ballad-bolero. Seriously, it’s good stuff – and, whilst it’s an older song from the duo it paves the way for discussions, and it may help your mates appreciate this new material all the more.

Melodic, distorted, and centered around the heart, a track like “I Shouldn’t Have Said That” is another piece of good stuff from the band you should know better.

For “I Shouldn’t Have Said That” we award The Lovely Eggs two bottles of red AND brown sauce that we’ve already shaken up so they won’t have any trouble pouring it out.